Inside the Star

“The Vilest Form of Evil:” Tim Bosma’s Murder One Year Later

On a Monday night last May, a Hamilton man took prospective buyers of his pickup truck out for a spin. I’ll be right back, Tim Bosma told his wife Sharlene. But he never returned, and two men are now charged with his murder. In an excerpt from a new Star Dispatches ebook, “The Vilest Form of Evil:” Tim Bosma’s Murder One Year Later, journalist Molly Hayes portrays a young husband and father whose senseless, seemingly inexplicable death has left his family devastated.

A missing person sign put up by family and friends, showing Tim Bosma and his pickup truck.

By:Molly HayesHamilton Spectator, Published on Fri May 02 2014

Tim Bosma was 29 when he and his future wife planned their dream home. That story, and his happy childhood in a loving family, are recounted in this excerpt from
“The Vilest Form of Evil:” Tim Bosma’s Murder One Year Later,
a new ebook available from
Star Dispatches
. The author, Hamilton Spectator reporter Molly Hayes, has just been named Canada’s best young journalist and winner of the annual Goff Penny Memorial Prize.

Tim Bosma and Sharlene Veenstra sat in lawn chairs in the middle of a big Ancaster cornfield, eyes closed and faces tilted toward the sky as they listened to the planes passing overhead. It was a summer afternoon in 2009, and Tim, 29, was dreaming of a future with the pretty young brunette. He’d been carrying around a diamond ring for months, waiting for the perfect moment to ask her to be his wife. They had been eyeing the rural Ancaster lot as a potential spot to build their dream home together. They visited regularly, roaming the fields and wondering “what if?”

It was the perfect rural location, a short drive from downtown Hamilton and minutes from the Ancaster fairgrounds, but still a sprawling plot of land with lots of room for their Great Dane puppy to run. It was also next door to the old farmhouse where Tim’s dad, Hank, had lived as a child. It was his father’s first home after coming to Canada from the Netherlands.

But the Hamilton airport was nearby, and the pair wanted to test out how much of an annoyance the planes would be. On another occasion, as they drove by in Tim’s pickup, he had assured her, “It’ll be fine.” Seconds later, five fighter jets roared overhead. She glared at him, skeptical. “OK,” he laughed, “that never happens, I swear.”

Family photos

Tim Bosma and Sharlene Veestra

So on that summer afternoon, they had tossed their lawn chairs in the back of Tim’s pickup and headed for the lot. Even as the planes flew over, Tim was drawing blueprints for the house in his head. The Trinity Road lot was for them. And within days of sealing the land deal, Sharlene accepted her country boy’s nervous marriage proposal.

Life became a whirlwind. By February, they were married, and by March, they were expecting a baby. Sharlene, a builder’s daughter, was just as excited as the guys about the construction of the house. Even with a growing belly, she swept sawdust and hammered nails as the place slowly came together that summer. When the crew — mostly friends and family — sat around at the end of the work day over a cooler of beer, pregnant Sharlene would join them, teased for her O’Doul’s non-alcoholic beer.

At night, she and Tim slept in a trailer on the lot. It was tough for the newlyweds, especially with a baby on the way and a puppy sharing the small space. But their future was being built in front of their eyes, and they were excited. By October, they had a home: a big, grey country house with a three-bay garage and a back deck overlooking the sprawling cornfields they’d sat in just a year earlier, when all of this was still a dream.

On Christmas Day, 2010, their daughter was born, and they began to plan camping trips and amusement park visits, family get-togethers and a growing small business. They looked forward to watching their daughter grow, to growing their family. But that has all been shattered. Dellen Millard, 28, and Mark Smich, 26, have been charged in Tim Bosma's murder.

The nursery at Hamilton’s
St. Joseph’s Hospital was full of baby girls on the day Tim was born, Aug. 12, 1980. The nurses had predicted Mary, too, would have a little girl, she remembers, based on the belief that a quicker heartbeat means it’s a female. But at 6:48 a.m., Timothy Hank Bosma came into the world at 8 lbs., 3 oz., and Hank yelled with joy.

Hank and Mary Bosma in 1980 with newborn Tim and daughters Jen and Michelle.

“I couldn’t believe it, it’s a boy, it’s a boy!” Hank recalls with a big grin almost 34 years later. The couple, in their late 20s then, already had two children — Jen, 6, and Michelle, 4 — but had trouble having a third. As the only man in the house (and a real guy’s guy at that), Hank was excited about having a little more testosterone in the mix. Two years after Tim, another daughter, Stephanie, arrived.

Mary remembers her little boy being close to his sisters and always on the go. He was very pale, with hair as white and light as duck fluff. He took after his parents, playing practical jokes on his buddies at Calvin Christian School, the same private institution Hank had attended. To save money, in their teens the kids were switched over to Ancaster High School. The public school also offered more trade skill courses. Like his dad, a sheet metal worker, Tim loved working with his hands.

When he was old enough, Tim would tag along with his dad to work. It was during those teen years that he and Hank really bonded, through early mornings and manual labour.

Tim when he was 12 or 13. He liked to tag along to work with his dad.

The day Tim turned 16, he and Hank pulled up to the Brantford licence bureau at 9 a.m. sharp. Tim passed his driving test, and from that day on they could barely pull him away from Hank’s pickup. After high school, he enrolled at Mohawk College and then apprenticed at an Oakville company to follow Hank into the HVAC trade. His dad urged him to get his refrigeration ticket, his gas ticket. By the time he was 21, Tim owned a small house on East 43rd Street on Hamilton Mountain, where he lived in the basement apartment and rented out the top floor. When his sister Stephanie got married and she and her husband had trouble finding a place of their own, Tim volunteered to move home for a few months so they could stay at his place. By 23, he had bought a second house, also on Hamilton Mountain and near Garth Street and Rymal Road. He renovated the basement apartment and rented it out.

Tim dated on and off, but spent most of his time with buddies — many of whom he met through Ancaster Christian Reformed Church — riding dirt bikes and snowmobiles and crashing old beater cars through the fields, even into trees. They had bonfires, killing themselves laughing at oxyacetylene explosions. Even in his early 20s, he lived for his four nieces and five nephews, getting them all so riled up that their parents vowed to get back at him once he had his own. As he got older, friends started to settle down, and Tim was best man at more than his share of weddings.

At 28, he started to dream about settling down himself. He signed up at eHarmony on a no-charge weekend (of course he waited until it was free, friends joked). Tim wanted to meet someone from outside his circle of friends.

That fall of 2008, Sharlene Veenstra, 29, was off from her job as an administrative assistant for two weeks because she’d fallen while painting a ceiling and, stuck at home, she decided to try online dating through eHarmony. She figured she’d let someone else (better yet, an algorithm) pick the guy, since a short history of bad relationships left her doubting her judgment in men.

One of the first fellows she was paired up with was a baby-faced blond named Tim Bosma, who had posted a photo of himself sitting at an outdoor patio. “Oh, hello,” she thought to herself. “You’re cute.” But Tim declined their match because her profile didn’t have a photo.

The photo of himself that Tim posted at eHarmony.

Stubborn, Sharlene quickly downloaded some photos of herself onto her new computer, uploading a couple to the site. She messaged him back, pleased with herself: “No, you need to look again.” Soon after, he got in touch. They messaged back and forth before finally meeting in person in November 2008.

Exactly one year after they had met, they purchased the land to build their home. Days later, Tim proposed. It was a Friday evening. Sharlene had just gotten off work and pulled up to her house in Baden. It was raining and Tim appeared to be in a panic. He’d taken Ava for a walk and had dropped his cellphone over by the railroad tracks, he told Sharlene. They frequently took walks there, laying down pennies for the trains to roll over. But Sharlene had had a crappy day.

“I’m like, ‘Can you just wait a minute? I need to have a beer.’ And he’s like, ‘Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.” She threw on a coat and her big, steel-toe rubber boots, and despite Tim’s protests grabbed a beer for the walk. They climbed over the fence in the backyard and trudged across the field to the tracks.

As she scanned the ground, she came across four planks of wood placed against the rails. They had writing on them, stencilled on with spray paint. Each one had a different word.

Will.

You.

Marry.

Me.

“I was like, ‘Oh, that’s so cute, somebody’s been here!” Sharlene remembers. A couple feet later there was another plank of wood.

“He got down on one knee, and he had the ring and I was crying. It was really cute.” After she said yes, she ran home to get their camera to document the proposal. That photo is framed in their house today. She still has the coins he put down on the tracks that day, along with the planks.

Sharlene started planning immediately for a winter wedding. They were married on Feb. 13, 2010. She jokes she made it easy for Tim, tacking their anniversary onto Valentine’s Day so he could never forget it.

For their honeymoon, they headed to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic — Sharlene’s first big trip. Within a day of arriving, they both got food poisoning. It was awful but an adventure, Sharlene says. Tim had this way of making everything an adventure.

Sharlene and Tim honeymooning at Punta Cana

The sixth of every month
has been difficult for Sharlene. The number on the calendar is a piercing reminder that it has been one more month since her husband was stolen from her and their daughter.

Their child, now 3, gets growing pains in the night, just like Tim did as a boy. Leg cramps that lead her to cry out for her daddy. She had them the night before, and Sharlene was up with her for hours. “It sucks,” she says with a shrug. No other way to put it.

Sharlene has started making scrapbooks for when her daughter gets older. Photos of just Tim and his little girl, their life together: selfies they took in the camper with their tongues touching their noses, or photos of them playing on the slide. Goofing around with the dog, Ava, or opening gifts Christmas morning.

She’s asked friends to email stories of Tim to save for her daughter.

When she dropped her laptop more than a year back, Sharlene worried that she’d lost videos of her and Tim together. But someone at her mom’s church took a look at the hard drive and was able to salvage all of them. It took her several months before she could watch them. But finally, she says, “I just got to the point where I missed the sound of him too much,” and she began to watch regularly.

Tim Bosma and his daughter.

Slowly but surely, life has gone on. Sharlene still finds it hard going out, even for groceries. Hank and Mary Bosma find that, too. Hank says “I want to cry all the time. My stomach has never been right since he disappeared. Still in a knot. I feel weepy, I can cry just like that.”

But they’re trying. They read books on grief. They’ve grown closer to Sharlene, spending extra time with their granddaughter, his spitting image. They go out with friends.

After Tim was killed, a trust fund was set up for Sharlene and her daughter, and she was overwhelmed by the public’s generosity. But she also realized that many people don’t get that kind of media attention or that much help. They started Tim’s Tribute, a charity that aims to help families of victims of homicide.

The murder trial is expected to start in 2015. “We vowed, the three of us, we’re going to be at every court case there is,” Hank says. “We vowed to be there, we just gotta be there. So (other) people are making plans to go on trips or holidays or camping, we don’t. We can’t. Until this is all over and done with.”

Things are up and down, but Mary says that for no apparent reason, she and Hank had an especially tough week recently. And then, at the door one day was a friend with a bouquet of tulips. A couple of days later, a fruit basket. And then in the mail, a gift card. All from friends, thinking of them. “Somehow they knew,” Mary says, choking up.

They refer to these moments as “roses in December,” a term from a grief book for special moments, people, memories that help the bereaved get through tough times.

They credit their faith more than anything for getting them through this year. “It’s a challenge in the way that, of course, we’re angry,” Mary says. “God did not do this, but he didn’t stop it. That is something that we always think of, too. But we could not have gotten through this without God . . . We don’t know why this happened, but without our faith I don’t think we’d be getting up every morning. We try to continue our life as best as we can.

“And that’s what Tim would’ve wanted. You can’t just sit at home and cry every day. It doesn’t do any good.”

What happens to a family when a loved one is murdered? “This will never really be over for us,” Sharlene Bosma tells journalist Molly Hayes, but “as a family, with our friends, and our community, we will remember Tim.” The family’s tragic and at times also poignant story is told in
“The Vilest Form of Evil:” Tim Bosma’s Murder One Year Later
, available through the weekly electronic book program Star Dispatches. To subscribe for $1 a week, go to
stardispatches.com
. Single copies are available for $2.99 at
stardispatches.com/starstore
and on itunes at
stardispatches.com/itunes
.

Molly Hayes, 23, is author of the previous Star Dispatches ebook Penniless Millionaire: How Sharon Tirabassi Lost Her Jackpot, and Other Tales of Lottery Woe, cited for its excellence by the Goff Penny Memorial Prize judges.

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